While not as potentially momentuous for the entire campaign as the session prior, our most recent meeting of The Rotten Labyrinth was also pretty important for all the present player characters. What started out as some plans to regroup, rest, and then take another pass at the labyrinth turned into a chaotic delay as all of that was interrupted by two random encounters during their night’s rest. I rolled incredibly, uh, portentiously on the encounter table, during their watches, and while one event went unnoticed until the morning, the other was an attack on the party that almost ended in disaster as one of the stronger monsters wandering that part of the labyrinth finally showed up. The battle itself was a bit of a mixed bag, featuring both a ton of players being knocked unconscious, but also featuring a ton of players getting back into the fray just long enough to make a difference. It really put a damper on the plan for one of the player characters (the Bard) to grab the petrified player character (the Wizard) and leave for their Sylum in search of help ending the petrification. We even had that player’s new character prepped and ready to go, but we never made it there because the monster showed up and disrupted all my plans for the session. Still, we got a lot done and now the players are faced with three new problems they’re finally aware of: who touched their character’s stuff while they slept, why did that blob show up to steal their characters’ memories, and why was one of their characters unable to leave the labyrinth during the battle?

Things started off smoothly enough. We caught up the player who had missed the last session, talked about what the party wanted to do, returned to camp to rest up because everyone was feeling ready for a Long Rest, and then figured out how they all spent a day of relaxation while they waited to be tired enough to sleep. There was talk of card games, two player characters both trying to cheat (one cheating to win and the other cheating to lose, so it worked out), a revelation that one of the player characters doesn’t actually need to eat, and even a discussion about what would be the best way to get their petrificed friend some help. They group actually discussed leaving the labyrinth briefly, but ultimately the Bard was able to convince everyone else that they’d be better on their own. The exact motivation for this character’s desire to depart wasn’t discussed much, but then no one really seemed to pry into why they might want to leave now as opposed to the last time they’d had that conversation. I know why, since their player and I have talked it out, but I’ll keep it to myself for now. I’m planning to wait until the party decides to dig for more information, which I suspect they will do if the players all remember what happened during the fight that took over this session, but we’ll see if it comes up or managed to fly underneath their radar somehow.

Things seemed to be going well that night, at least at first. The first two watches passed uneventfully and it looked like the third was going to as well until an oozing, globular creature of some kind appeared around the corner. The party’s sentry, unfortunately, rolled very poorly and didn’t hear it until it was almost upon him. He tried to hide from it, to see if it would just go past their largely hidden camp, but it already knew he was there thanks to its uncanny perceptive abilites (I mean, it doesn’t have eyes or anything since it’s an ooze, so it’s just sort of aware of stuff in a certain radius around it). This decision by the Fighter as he sat on watch was unfortunately the wrong one, since it meant that the creature was able to approach him and start a fight before anyone other than the Bard (who doesn’t sleep in the traditional manner) was aware that it was there. The Bard and Fighter swung on it, laying into it as best as they could, after it attacked and then tried to drain something from the Bard–who was able to easily resist whatever this was–but the rest of the party was slower to respond and far less protected against what it was trying to do.

It looked at first like the party was gaining the upper hand at first as they all gathered around it and swung away, but they quickly learned that whatever it was able to drain from the player characters restored its health while also hurting its target. It did not help them that, as it started lashing out at the people around it, the party’s heaviest hitter, the Ranger, was seemingly unwilling to contemplate leaving the labyrnith in order to gain the distance he needed to better use his bow to attack this thing. Then the Barbarian fell–who’d been able to shrug off SOME of the damage this thing dealt and slow it down as a result–and while the Bard got her back up again quickly, her being down for a round was enough for this gelatinous creature to start taking down other party members who were far less durable. Once the creature had drained something from one of theparty members, it would bludgeon them into unconsciousness and then target someone else. It was a battle of attrition that it looked like the party was slowly winning, but then the creature took down two party members in the same turn and the remaining conscious folks didn’t do enough damage without them to take it out.

Then, on it’s final drain attack, it got a critical hit and restore a large chunk of its own hit points. It looked like that might be it for the party sine half of the unconscious players had already failed multiple death savings throws, but then the party started rolling Natural 20s on their death saves, which returned them to consciousness at the start of their turn. Despite that, the only way they were going to be able to eke out a win was if they got lucky and the creature got unlucky, but then the creature turned and started to leave. Only one of the player characters wasn’t able to figure out that this mostly-healed creature was leaving, seemingly content with having drained something from every one of them save the Bard (the only one who had managed to put up a proper resistance to it), but they missed their attack and the creature was able to depart in peace as the party picked themselves up off the ground and lamented being in such rough shape at what was, essentially, the end of their long rest. From there, as they cleaned their wounds and took stock of their camp (and their allies who hadn’t been involved in the fight), they discovered that someone or something had been in their camp, rifling through their things, without them noticing, which greatly added to the unease they felt. Especially when they realized that they might just not remember what had gone missing since the creature that attacked them had been syphoning away some of their memories. Between these missing memories, the possibility of things having gone missing from their camp, and the players learning that the characters who had completed the magical ritual had to pass a hefty Wisdom Saving Throw if they wanted to leave the labyrinth, the mood was a little dour at the end.

Since I hadn’t expected this threat to show up and we’d spent most of the session fighting this creature, I decided to call it there rather than push my players to carry on with another day where most of them had already finished a long rest and now, suddenly needed another. Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s time for them to hit level 3 and I wanted to take some time to check some things on my end (namely if I’d finished making the custom Rogue subclass for the rogue-who-wants-to-be-a-non-magical-healer, which I hadn’t), so best to just let them take some time and either start our next session with them leveling up or prompt them to do it when I share this post and put out the call for who will be able to attend the upcoming session. Plus, I was pretty tired. All of this was very stressful and exhausting. I don’t enjoy almost killing my players, but they were in one of the most dangerous parts of this level of the labyrinth so I couldn’t exactly pull my punches, especially when the encounter table I’m rolling on has existed since before they decided to go into this part of the labyrinth. Now there’s a slimey creature out there, oozing along the ground, that has some of their memories, and I’m certain that’s going to be trouble for them in the future. After all, I know why it was doing what it was doing and my players, unfortunately, do not. Which, you know, is a fun place for me to be in! Stressful, yes, but fun! I just hope they get a break before I roll this encounter on the table again. It would suck for them to run into it again so soon. They might not survive it a second time, especially now that it has what it wanted from them…